The Pope - Another Perspective

There are at least two sides to every story and so it should come as no surprise that not everyone loved JP II. Let's start with Hitch (we should always start with the brilliant Mr. Hitchens). He's at his best at the start:

The papacy is not, in theory, a man-made office at all. Its holder is chosen for life, by God himself, to hold the keys of Peter and to be the vicar of Christ on earth. This is yet another of the self-imposed tortures that faith inflicts upon itself. It means that you have to believe that the pope before last, who held on to the job for a matter of weeks before dying (or, according to some, before being murdered) was either unchosen by God in some fit of celestial pique, or left unprotected by heaven against his assassins. And it means that you have to believe that the public agony and humiliation endured by the pontiff was also part of some divine design. In the case of a presidency, or even a monarchy, provision can be made for abdication and succession when physical and mental deliquescence occur. But there could obviously not have been any graceful retirement in the case of John Paul II. The next vicar of Christ could hardly be expected to perform his sacred duties knowing that there was a still-living vicar of Christ, however decrepit, on the scene. Thus, and as with the Schiavo case, every last morsel of misery has been compulsorily extracted from the business of death. For the people who credit the idea, apparently, heaven can wait. Odd.

I leave it to the faith-based to wrestle with all this. Or rather, I would be happy to do so if they would stay out of my life. But there is one detail that sticks with me. A few years ago, it seemed quite probable that Cardinal Bernard Law of Boston would have to face trial for his appalling collusion in the child-rape racket that his diocese had been running. The man had knowingly reassigned dangerous and sadistic criminals to positions where they would be able to exploit the defenseless. He had withheld evidence and made himself an accomplice, before and after the fact, in the one offense that people of all faiths and of none have most united in condemning. (Since I have more than once criticized Maureen Dowd in this space, I should say now that I think she put it best of all. A church that has allowed no latitude in its teachings on masturbation, premarital sex, birth control, and divorce suddenly asks for understanding and "wiggle room" for the most revolting crime on the books.)

His closing is equally compelling:

No obituary about John Paul II, for example, will omit to mention that he exerted enormous force to change the politics of Poland. Well, good for him, I would say. (He behaved much better on that occasion than he did when welcoming Tariq Aziz, one of Saddam Hussein's most blood-spattered henchmen, to an audience at the Vatican and then for a private visit to Assisi.) But let nobody confuse the undermining of a Stalinist bureaucracy in a majority Catholic nation with the insidious attempt to thwart or bend the law in a secular democracy. And let nobody say that this is no problem.

At the New Republic a dissenter or two can also be found. Lee Siegel goes after the media and the late Pontiff:

For beyond the Pope's integrity, and dignity, and humanity, was the simple fact that his intransigence about abortion, and science's role in modern life, and gay marriage, and contraception, had alienated vast numbers of Catholics who wanted to carry their faith with them into their modern lives. His stubbornness about contraception ensured that vast numbers of the Catholic poor, forbidden birth control, would stay poor. And John Paul's appointment of key cardinals who shared his intransigence guaranteed that the Church would remain in crisis, like the poor, for generations. You could argue that nothing except good things should be said of the recently deceased. But the talking heads are not exactly primed to reexamine Catholicism in a critical way after the event of the Pope's death has given way to the next late-breaking story. And John Paul's death was not the death of an ordinary man.

Since Siegel's column is supposed to be about the media he trains back on them:

After performing as evangelicals in the Ashley Smith story, and after miming sympathy for the fundamentalist cause in the Schiavo case, only to turn that sorrowful tale into a version of the most gruesome reality television, the talking heads took up their rosaries for their reports on the Pope. Anderson Cooper declared that the Pope was dead, "his soul departed, his body at peace, serene." How this journalist was able to ascertain that the Pope had a soul, and that this soul had now left the Pontiff's body, let alone that said body was "at peace" and "serene," he didn't say. Soon they'll be doing exorcisms on C-Span. And they forced Dan Rather to retire because of a few faked memos!